the lion tracker’s guide to life | boyd varty
notes:
Laurens van der Post said of the lion’s roar that “it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky.”
The unbroken stream of life that animates all things is supremely intelligent, and nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it truly is.
Outside my door, a story is being told in the night. The tracker inside me is waking up to listen. The tracker inside me wants to be part of telling that story.
To track is to discover that nature is alive and speaks a language all its own. To track is to travel the trail of an animal and weave yourself into the tapestry of its story. It is an art that lives inside us, a way of being in union with the natural world.
We have forgotten that life holds a unique story for us all. A thread made up of faint signs that lead to the manifestation of something unique. What the native people call “your medicine way.” Something that only you can give to the world.
Inside you is the wild part of you that knows what your gift, purpose, and mission are. That part of you is wild and elusive. It cannot be captured, as it is always evolving. To live on its trail, you must become a tracker. In some ways, this book is a mythology. It is the story of the day I found my track. It is my story, but I hope it will be the beginning of a new story for you, and for all of us who want to make a new world.
Alex is one of the best trackers in southern Africa, ten years older than me, close enough to get into trouble together, old enough to guide me out of it. A true friend and mentor.
In some ways Ren is more in touch with his wild animal nature than anyone I know, and this makes him more truly human.
Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.
I once heard her described as “steel cables wrapped in velvet.”
Moments like this have a strange disorientation to them: a few minutes ago you were driving the Land Rover in your dream job and chatting to some tourists, the next you are over the lip of the abyss of death. The speed of the change is almost impossible to grasp.
“Buti, you know I have never been turned down by a woman. It is because I ate a lot of warthog meat as a child, gives my body a good smell.” He laughs intensely at his own joke. Ren often unleashes unsolicited fun facts.
The art of the way the tracker sees is the way he can look at the thing he has seen a thousand times and always see something new. Renias has been out in the bush every morning of his life. He is fifty-five years old. And each day he looks at it anew and asks “Why?”
The owl is a symbol that you are in a wild place where few people will ever venture; where the environment conveys a nature deep within your own being.
Everything in the natural world knows how to be itself.
We are a part of nature, and inside each of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it is meant to do. Inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here.
Yet most of us have so much of the social conditioning of modern life that the track of the wild self has been lost. We live with our attention directed outward. We focus on the social cues of our culture. We look to others to define our path and value and purpose. We lose ourselves in shoulds.
Shoulds are full of traps—traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself. No wild animal has ever participated in a should.
Before he even becomes conscious that he has seen it, he reacts. Like a boxer whose body has a memory faster than conscious thought.
The father washes onto the son. He lives inside you as an aspiration, a disappointment, or a fear. Afraid you will never be like him or afraid you will be; he is there in the bones of your emotions. In the voices in your head. In your expectations of yourself. In the shadows of your weakness or strength. No matter how good the relationship, there is a tension between father and son.
They say that the children of alcoholics know what the night will hold by the sound of the keys hitting the hallway table.
in native traditions, the mentor to the young man is never the father but a close male relative.
don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.
The American tracker Tom Brown says, “The first track is one end of a string. On the other end, a creature is moving.”
As I watch Renias now I am struck by how disconnected we are from the body. Obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body. How its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy. How it can tell you if something is right for you or not by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body, the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.
has harmonized and integrated him in the way you might drive a car without thinking about it. He is doing a lot of difficult things while appearing to do nothing.
I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there might be the motto of the great tracker.
Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.” In the bush and in life, we don’t get trails fully laid out. We get tremendous unknowns and, if we are lucky, first tracks. Then next first tracks.
Seeing someone who simply doesn’t have the social programming you do is profound because it forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as “this is how I am” or “this is what you do” is not you at all but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story. You have been told what to be and want. This realization is immense as it is the beginning of a much deeper question about what we actually want.
You are your outlook, and that outlook is not universal. It was given to you. The aboriginals used to say of modern life, “It’s three days deep.” In three days in wilderness, you learn what’s important and your mind changes. Your way of being shifts.
It was St. Francis who said, “Wherever you go, preach the gospel; when necessary use words.”
We are a species that belongs within stories. We are the meaning-making animal.
Tracking is a narrative that can help us reimagine why we are here.
It’s hard to know when to stay on a trail and when to divert. It’s hard to know when the lesson is to persist and when the lesson is to let it go.
I think of all the angst I have felt between choices. I’ve been paralyzed by options and the idea that there is a single right way. Ren is more Zen; for him the only choice is the one he has made. He knows any choice will set something in motion.
On the trail there is not one way; the only mistake is to not make any choice. As it is in life.
I can’t say why this track is calling him to life or if instead he is bringing the track to life. Is he calling to it or is it calling him?
For two boys who had just lost their father, he must have come as masculine directive manna from heaven.
Carl Jung referred to “synchronicity” as a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with
something deeply meaningful to your inner life. The place in space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human self in a moment of meaning specific to you. It is the moment when, in telling someone about a dream you had in which a beetle landed on you, a beetle flies in the open window and lands on you. It is a kind of glimpse into an order and meaning that runs beneath the face of reality; life winking at you. I suspect the wild part of you is at one with nature by being at one with the nature inside you. If you can unite these two aspects of nature, your own purpose is aligned with a greater purpose.
If this intelligence runs through all things, why not me? Who would I be at my most natural?
As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this “the path of not here.” No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.
If you have never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.
If something is all you have ever known, you mistakenly believe that’s just how it is.
When Renias imitates people and animals, they come to life before us, as they do with many great trackers. He is a tremendous mimic, and Alex and I have on occasion fallen down laughing as Renias morphed into the living caricature of an angry safari lodge manager, a French safari-goer with stiff legs, and then suddenly a copulating mouse that he had seen in the rafters above his bed. Renias can awaken the mundane with his sheer inner openness.
Once Alex took Renias on his first-ever plane trip from South Africa to London. The entire flight Renias refused to watch movies. Rather he stared at the sky map intently, watching the flight path of the plane. Upon landing ten hours later, he turned to Alex and, supremely content, declared, “Alex, if we need to walk home, I know the way.”
Lions are most dangerous on two occasions: when they have cubs and when they have meat. Something in them is activated when the air is thick with the smell of blood and flesh.
In the days after the incident, I dreamed of that lion. I began to feel our encounter, although brief, was a kind of gift. To this day I wonder about the courage I found underneath the fear. I wonder if I could find it again. I wonder if it is wrong to look for it. I know that one of the great dangers of my life would be to live without danger. In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply.
“The miracle is not walking on the water; the miracle is walking on the earth,” said the teacher Thích Nhất Hanh.
It is a kind of energy I have witnessed in people who have merged “work,” “mission,” and “meaning.” These people don’t take holidays or need days off. They outwork everyone not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.
Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt. I have learned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a teacher of humility. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track.
Every seemingly unconnected track has led here to this realization: my track is to send out the call to the tribe of forgotten trackers and ask them to remember.
You who have longed for and felt called to make a different world. You who have suffered the illnesses of society. You who have risen to the top and found it empty. You with a desire to serve. You who have felt called to nature and to the creatures of the earth. You are the tracker.
A person who is living in the authentic wild self becomes a transformer. Not by what they do, but by the very realness of their life that asks others to switch on. In these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism.
Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply on your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them.
We know there are monsters down there. We have reached the moment that asks us about our commitment, our motivation, and our madness.
The bush is psychedelic with color. My hearing is electric. My sense of smell is capturing everything. The animal in me is fully awake. I am alive.
We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life.
Meaning doesn’t want more; when you’re in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough.
Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel
profoundly wrong.
Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable.
janet change 